


Playing for a Draw

by nnozomi



Category: The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 02:52:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4689653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nnozomi/pseuds/nnozomi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One gets used to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Playing for a Draw

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [Antonia_Forest_Fanworks_2015](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Antonia_Forest_Fanworks_2015) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
> I'm fascinated by the before and after of Mrs Lambert, and would love to see what others make of her. What became of Mr Lambert - what happened to make Mrs Lambert so embittered - how did she end up at Kingscote? And where did she go after she left? Did Ginty ever cross her path again, perhaps years in the future? Any content welcome, no 'do not wants'.
> 
> Much of the content of this fic was inspired by the discussion at the Trennels comm; many thanks. I'm sorry to say I didn't have time to do the research I ought to have done; in particular, I'm pretty sure the legal content is completely off the wall. (If anyone would like to suggest more plausible alternatives, I will gladly edit!)

Corinne straightened the corners of the files in her in-box and took out the cover for her typewriter. Before she could stand up, Mr. Meadows emerged from his room and peered shortsightedly down at her. “Nearly off then, Mrs. Lambert?”

“Yes, Mr. Meadows. If there isn’t anything else today?”

“No, no, I expect it’s time and more. Enjoy your weekend, Mrs. Lambert.”

“Thank you,” she said, getting to her feet and adjusting the hang of her cardigan a little. She crossed behind Mr. Meadows and tapped lightly on the other open door. “Mr. Maricas? Will there be anything else today?”

Mr. Maricas blinked at her from behind his big desk. He was with a client, a young woman with a light brown bob who had come in that afternoon for the first time. “In fact there is, Mrs. Lambert, if you can give me another five minutes or so?”

“Of course.” It wasn’t as if there was anyone waiting for her at home, and this wasn’t one of her concert evenings.

He came fussily out from behind the desk to make sure she had a chair to sit in, explaining the while that what was needed was another witness signature on a document of inheritance. “You won’t remember Mr. Keyes, Mrs. Lambert, the last time he called on us was _quite_ some time in the past, when Miss Walling was with us. He has very unfortunately passed away, and the terms of his will include a portion of his estate going to his niece, that is Miss Sanger here.”

The young woman nodded politely. Mid-twenties, perhaps? It was quite hard to identify her age; she looked nearly a schoolgirl from one angle, thirty or more from another. She was slim and neatly made, wearing a serviceable grey suit which was neither specially fashionable nor unusually dowdy. Very well-turned calves and slender ankles. Not pretty, but rather nice to look at with her thin mobile face. All this Corinne took in automatically in her first full look.

Mr. Maricas went on talking placidly—like quite a lot of women but rather fewer men, he seemed to like a constant flow of talk, and the gentle hum of his voice was a constant background to Corinne’s days in the office—as he arranged the documents. He explained conscientiously what exactly the deceased Mr. Albert David Keyes had had to leave, and where and how the inheritance could be obtained. The amount he quoted was neither pathetic nor princely, and Corinne saw the young woman’s mouth turn up a little, ruefully, at one corner: not in despair, but not pleased.

The final page of the document contained Mr. Maricas’ spiky signature on the solicitor’s line already, and Mr. Meadows’ neat copperplate on one of the two lines for witnesses. Miss Sanger took the offered pen, the gold fountain pen Mr. Maricas claimed to have used since leaving school during the First War, and signed _L.M. Sanger_ on the beneficiary’s line. Her writing was clear and again rather schoolgirlish, with an oversized loop for the _g_.

Corinne took the pen next, found her place and signed _C. E. W. Lambert_. It was not the first time she’d had this part to play, and she’d started out writing “Corinne Eliza Wakefield Lambert” in full, until Mr. Maricas explained to her that it was as well for women to use their initials, since that way it might have been a man signing. Charles Edward, perhaps. Cecil Eustace. C. E. could stand for anything.

For all their Edwardian aspect, Mr. Maricas and Mr. Meadows had any number of useful bits of advice like that, things that made it just slightly easier for a woman left single to make her way in the world. Corinne hadn’t ever had to do with solicitors before, except for the divorce, and Guy had handled all that.

It had apparently been a bit of a shock to him to find her where she was now. Corinne had not meant anything of the sort; she had simply sent a card to let Guy know her new address, and that she had left the locum agency and had a permanent position as secretary for a firm of solicitors. It was thereafter that his monthly payments had become prompter and more reliable; it had taken her some time to realize that he’d taken the mention of solicitors as a hint of having the law on him if he didn’t comply.

Not that she would do any such thing; the shame would be too much, and she could hardly picture Guy with his smooth City voice in the same room as elderly, courtly Mr. Maricas and Mr. Meadows. Still, it was nice not to have to worry every month about the rent for her tidy bedsitter with its pretty chintz curtains. Perhaps Guy and his Julia were hoping that she’d marry again, but it was hard to imagine that happening now.

She was far more content with the two superannuated solicitors than in any other job so far, and grateful that their former, equally elderly secretary had chosen to retire. It was so much more pleasant than school office work. During her year at Kingscote School, Corinne had found the multitude of small tasks which were a school secretary’s lot all too stressful; there were endless mistakes to be made, none of which one seemed able to foresee and discover until having once made each one, leading to anything from a Headmistress’ scolding to a week of evenings working late to repair a misentered ledger to a “ _Please_ , Miss, this isn’t _my_ Stifficate you’ve given me” from a Second Former. Trying to avoid tripping into yet another trap for heffalumps, she had insisted on confirmation of each new request from the girls, earning herself a reputation among them for fussiness, difficulty, which she felt was undeserved.

A few of the youngest girls, dark-haired, had made her wince secretly and look away from them—blue-eyed Melanie Brant of the Second Form, or the pale child with braids, Amy something, who had most often come in under the auspices of that Marlow girl’s older sister. They might have been… The older girls had had no such effect on her; in all the time during the Guy years that she had filled with imaginings, there was little of it that she’d spent on picturing herself the mother of a girl her own height, with an adult’s collected speech.

With the older girls, what troubled her was the way _they_ didn’t look at _her._ In the typing pool, before Guy, she had always been the recipient of small flicked glances from assorted directions—envy, admiration, rivalry, wistfulness, depending on how pretty the other girl was and how she felt about Corinne. There was nothing of this from the Fifth and Sixth Formers at Kingscote: they were mostly polite (some obviously a bare surface of manners, others with genuine care), but they never saw her as a woman, just another “staff” from whom pocket money and stamps could be obtained upon request—if, that was, she didn’t bungle it, or demand assurances that she felt were only natural and they seemed to consider unreasonable.

The worst had been that Marlow girl’s affair, of course—the first and only time Corinne had cried herself to sleep since getting over Guy’s announcement. Not for the Marlow girl, who had gotten herself into her own trouble and gotten off, it seemed, very lightly indeed, but because of the way she, Corinne, had been spoken to by Miss Ferguson and Miss Keith.

She still felt that they had been unjust. Certainly the various troubles for which she had prepared had not actually taken place—the O-level papers had been in the envelope as they should be, and the boy, whatever his name had been, had not _actually_ been told the questions in advance—but who could deny their possibility? If, for instance, he _had_ heard something he ought not, and she had _not_ given his school such a firm warning—surely that would have been very wrong. She could not understand why Miss Keith and her staff refused to see it this way.

So it had not been a great wrench at the end of the year, when Miss Carter returned and Corinne bade her farewells to Kingscote.

It was true, though, that her next assignment, secretary to the head of engineering at a bearings plant in St. Albans, had been comparatively devoid of interest in some ways. She did like finding out bits about the girls’ home and school lives, sometimes from chatting with them directly, more often from the paperwork in the office and from half-understood staffroom gossip. The solicitors’ office offered something of the same appeal, as both Mr. Maricas and Mr. Meadows tended to keep their office doors open; even when the doors were closed, more often than not the clients were sufficiently elderly and hard of hearing that voices had to be raised. Corinne’s almost somnolently peaceful days were brightened by this succession of minor family and business dramas. She wondered what this Miss Sanger would do with her modest inheritance, and whether she had been fond of her deceased uncle.

Excused from Mr. Maricas’ room, Corinne covered her typewriter and made her way out into the warmth of the late afternoon, wondering whether there would be any decent mutton chops in the butcher’s or whether she ought to content herself with herring and perhaps a sliced tomato. Her mind running on tea, she was slow to notice the crowd near the entrance to the station until she had reached the roundabout. A porter stood on the steps, calling out something inaudible but predictable at regular intervals.

“Oh dear,” said a voice at her shoulder, surprisingly close, and she jumped a little and turned to find Miss Sanger, with the jacket of her grey suit now draped over one arm. They must have left the office at nearly the same time. “Do you think there’s been an accident?”

“They’ve had trouble with the points again,” Corinne guessed. “It happens quite often here, especially on hot days. I expect you’d better look for a bus if you’re in a hurry.”

Miss Sanger sighed. “I’m not very well served by any of the bus routes, that’s the trouble. I chose my room because it was on the train line to Gill’s.”

“Gill’s?” Corinne repeated vaguely, wondering if it was worth standing in the forecourt waiting for the station to open again.

“Sorry―the Eleanor Gill School for Girls―my job. I teach physical education.”

That explained her nice legs, then. “You don’t live in at the school?” Corinne wondered aloud. The deciding force in her choice of Kingscote as a place of employment had been the chance to live in: she hadn’t then been able to face explaining all to an estate agent, or walking the pavements looking for “Room to Let” cards in the window.

“It’s a day school,” Miss Sanger explained, distractedly. “Well, I suppose that means a long wait coming up. Dear old British Rail. At least I hadn’t any plans for the evening.”

They were just passing the Rose Marie, a tearoom where Corinne occasionally passed a few minutes if she had just missed a train on her way out. “Would you like to have a cup of tea instead of waiting at the station?” she asked suddenly, an impulse perhaps motivated by nothing more than Miss Sanger’s quick, charming smile.

“Oh yes,” said the younger woman. “Yes, what a nice idea, it’s so hot,” and in a very short time they were facing one another across one of the little white wicker tables, with its tiny spray of dusty-pink artificial rosebuds.

“Do you like teaching?” Corinne asked conventionally, after their order had arrived.

“Yes,” said Miss Sanger, without particular enthusiasm.

“You haven’t any plans at present to marry, to have children?” Corinne cut a slice of raisin loaf, and then rejected the slice and her own words together. “I _do_ apologize, I expect people ask you that all the time. At your age.”

Miss Sanger tilted her head a little and smiled, that quick charming smile again. She deftly accepted the slice of bread and began to butter it with small quick strokes. “Actually, once you become a mistress at a girls’ school people seem to feel you’re set up as a spinster for life, it’s a terribly widespread idea. You’d be surprised.”

“And do most of the mistresses actually prefer it that way? I used to work at a school secretary, you know. Most of the staff I knew always seemed rather, oh, intended for that way of life.” There were times when Corinne had felt herself almost a different species from the others in the staffroom at Kingscote: try as she would, she could not imagine them married or mothers, alone with a man instead of wrapped up in their world of women and girls. Some had the traditional schoolmistress’ stocky figure, virginal bun and face like the back of a bus, but others, even most, had clearly been as attractive as any given girl in the typists’ pool. And yet she couldn’t believe that sarcastic Miss Cromwell (with her elegant bone structure of the type Guy would have called _jolie laide_ ) or placid Miss Boyd (grey-eyed, black-haired, kitten-faced) had ever walked out with a man, hoped for orange blossom and children and a home of their own. At least she herself knew what _real_ life was like, Corinne had thought when receiving one of those dismissive glances, at least _she_ hadn’t spent her whole life immured like a nun.

Miss Sanger sighed and flicked her eyes up a little, bringing her teacup to her mouth for a small sip. “They _do_ , don’t they. When I was a schoolgirl I took it for granted, but now…Of course, it could be just that there aren’t opportunities to speak of, no one to meet…it would be different at one of the new mixed comprehensives, I expect.”

“Would you like to teach at one of those?” Corinne had barely heard of them, apart from the odd bit of news on the wireless.

“Oh _no_. You hear such things. At least the girls at Gill’s—my school now—at least they do what one says, pretty much. Although…” She sighed again, stroked an errant wisp of hair back off her cheek. “My first couple of years teaching, I used to get _horribly_ frustrated—because I’m a games mistress, you see, and naturally we play matches against other schools. Netball, cricket, you know. …Did you ever play?”

“Oh, all the usual things, when I was at school. I always preferred the dancing classes. I was never very keen on games.”

“Well, I was. I couldn’t _bear_ it if we didn’t win—I couldn’t understand how the girls in the team didn’t always seem to _care_ enough. I hated standing on the sidelines with a whistle, when what I really wanted was to jump in and play myself if they couldn’t do the job.” She laughed, the sound slightly forced. “That’s not what games mistresses are for, of course. You need to make the girls _want_ to win, and it’s far _more_ difficult than just playing yourself…Well. I’m boring you, I do apologize. It seems one can’t be a teacher without going on and on about it at every opportunity.”

Corinne found the corners of her mouth turning up, in spite of herself. “Perhaps you’re right,” she said, pouring more tea. “It’s terribly difficult, making other people want things.” The specter of Guy passed briefly across her mind, and away again. “But—“ voicing her own vade mecum—“I expect one gets used to it.”

“Yes,” said Miss Sanger. “Thank you—“ as she accepted her second cup of tea. “Yes, one does—I _have_ gotten used to it, and that’s, well, a bit shattering in itself, I suppose. I mean—if you don’t mind a few more minutes of listening to me blather on?” with a flicker of smile—“if one doesn’t care _so_ much about winning, then, well, why play in the first place? After all, the object of the game is to win—“ in a half chant. “And it’s not as if most people _like_ running endlessly up and down a netball court or a cricket pitch, in the cold or the heat, according to the season.”

“I suppose there’s the pleasure of the skill?” Corinne offered half-heartedly.

“Yes, that. Well, of course, if one isn’t skillful enough to win in the first place, there isn’t much pleasure to be found in it…” Miss Sanger looked down at her plate. “Perhaps that’s how the girls feel, at least. Sometimes it doesn’t seem fair, that the only thing one’s really good at is so taken up with winning and losing.”

“Have you any hobbies outside of games?” Corinne asked, thinking of the violin recital she had heard two weeks ago and the ballet matinée she would see that weekend.

“Oh—well—no, not really.” For the first time, Miss Sanger looked uncomfortable. “In school I played games and I was a Patrol Leader in the Guides, but not… I expect I ought to take something up, it’s what grown people do, isn’t it? but there doesn’t seem to be anything I’d like to do.”

Concert-going was something Corinne had taken up during the war. Going to hear Myra Hess and her cohorts in the National Gallery was something of a fad among the girls in the Met typing pool; one felt so highbrow, and it was so comforting in its absolute remoteness from typewriter ribbons and noxious public shelters. Later, Guy had taken her to concerts before they were married, each occasion breathless with pleasure, the music beaded over with the dew of excitement in his presence. There had been more concerts in the early years of their marriage; later on, more often than not he “couldn’t possibly find the time this month, sorry, darling, not with the deal I’ve got on.” And she wouldn’t go on her own, of course.

During the year at Kingscote, she had increasingly found the radio more congenial company than the other staff; the little transistor followed her to the bearings factory, and then to her Ruislip bedsit. Settled in with Mr. Maricas and Mr. Meadows, she could afford to go and hear a concert a handful of times in a month. Almost by chance she had started attending the ballet as well, time and money permitting, and found it, if anything, even more addictive than the concert hall.

“Perhaps you’d enjoy the ballet,” she suggested, swayed by evangelism. “I go quite often, and they’re very athletic, you know. I understand they have to practice as hard as athletes do. And one needn’t worry about winning or losing.”

Miss Sanger tilted her head, taken a little by surprise. “I’ve never been. Girls at school did ballet, but I never had the time. And aren’t the seats, well, terribly expensive?”

“Not so very much, if you aren’t too fussy about where you sit. And you have a nest egg now, don’t you?”

“Oh—Yes, I suppose so.” Miss Sanger filled Corinne’s empty tea cup. “I can’t quite—I wasn’t expecting anything from Uncle David, really, but when your Mr. Maricas wrote me to say I’d an inheritance, I, well—“ She laughed briefly, swallowing the sound. “I suppose I had fantasies of becoming a lady of leisure, or, oh, founding my own school for athletics, or…”

“It’s a pity…”

“Oh, I wasn’t really serious. Uncle David wasn’t fabulously rich, after all, just comfortable. And it is nice to know I could have a bit of a cushion if I chose to leave my job, for instance.”

“Should you like to?” Corinne imagined herself with an unthought-of inheritance (from whom? Apart from the alimony, Guy’s money would all go to Julia now, and he was still hale. Her mother lived on a budget very much like Corinne’s own, and there were no other relatives) and wondered if she would enjoy being a lady of leisure. She had a sudden instinct that it might be paralyzingly lonely, far worse than life now. The specter of old age came and went, as more often now, and chilled her momentarily.

Miss Sanger was staring out the window as if her thoughts, like Corinne’s, were turning on the future. “I really don’t know,” she said, with another short embarrassed laugh. Speaking suddenly faster, “You know, there was a girl I was at school with—a, a classmate, and we were on teams together—she was good, but I think I was better—“ She stopped for breath. “She left, before I did, she went to work on her family farm. She came from a _huge_ family, six of them, she was the best at games but they were all that way, acting as if they were _special_ —I’m sorry, I’m sure I’m not making sense.”

“I know just what you mean.”

“Do you? Well—anyway—I used to think of her occasionally, moldering away in the countryside, and feel, well, as if I’d won the match, I suppose… . And I suppose that’s true, really. But it’s surprising, how often I think about her. I’m sure she never thinks of me at all.”

Corinne hoped that, if she should ever mention Guy (and there was really no need to do so any more, was there?), her voice would not have that tone of wistfulness.

They finished their tea. Miss Sanger turned to look out the window again, this time with intent. “The trains are running again,” she reported. “I expect there’ll be a terrible crush, but…”

“But at least one can get home.” Corinne opened her change purse, only to be stopped by a hand on her arm.

“No, do let me pay for tea. After all, I’ve come into money—“ with the earlier smile—“and you’ve been terribly kind, listening to me ramble on.”

“Not at all. Thank you. Do think about joining me at the ballet sometime,” Corinne added, rather to her own surprise. “I’m sure you’d like it.”

“Perhaps I will.”

Of course, one wasn’t really supposed to socialize with the clients—not that the opportunity had ever presented itself. But it wasn’t as if Miss Sanger were a man on the make. Surely there could be no harm in a social acquaintance with a woman who was, after all, nearly young enough to be her daughter.

 


End file.
